I was watching the videos made as part of the University of Chicago History of Censorship and Information Control series, and in the fifth one, Joshua Craze talks about his work with the redacted documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act dealing with the War on Terror. This poem is a response to that.
He works on papers censored out
Black boxes blocking what they show
And making partial what we know
Yet shaping what we know about.
He reads the words they let him see
(a man)(was)(waterboarded) and between
The blocks and blanks of the unseen
What else was done? What else could be?
Reading the truth between the li(n)es
The few clear words that are let fall
Connecting up the hints and signs
Out of this blankness, shrunk so small,
He wonders, in these dark confines,
How anything gets said at all.
